Tuesday, September 9, 2014

I
had a wonderful time at the Historical Novel Society Conference in London last
weekend (5-7 September 2014). There were some great panels and workshops, and
it was lovely to meet old friends and make new ones.

One
of the workshops I attended was “Feisty Heroines and Dutiful Wives” which looked
at the challenges of writing about women in history when their lives were so
often constrained by prevailing custom, ideology and law. The panellists were
Jessie Burton (The Miniaturist), Kate Forsyth (best-selling author of thirty
books including The Wild Girl and Bitter Greens) and Professor Diana Wallace (Professor of English Literature at the University of
South Wales, The Woman's Historical Novel).

It was a topic that interested me
because most of my stories have a male leading character. This surprises even
me sometimes! After all, my main perspective in history and literature is a
feminist one, and my literary giants are Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft,
Charlotte Smith and a host of other amazing women authors, particularly those
writing in the eighteenth century (when most of my stories are set).

But
I don’t believe that writing with a male protagonist puts
me outside the feminist pale when it comes to thinking about what life was (and
sometimes still is) like for women. In a recent on-line discussion with writer
Jane Davis, I was asked if the fact that opportunities for women were so
limited influenced my decision to write from a male perspective in my eighteenth-century
thriller To The Fair Land. I answered:-

Yes, partly. Mainly, though, it was also part of
the point of the thing. To The Fair Land is about a woman who has been
somewhere women weren’t supposed to go and done things women weren’t supposed
to do, and finding out about her from a male perspective was, I thought, a way
of showing up the attitudes that tried to keep women in their place. Ben is no
“right on” male...He’s limited by his own conventions, and this limitation is
one of the things that makes it hard for him to get to the truth. So it’s about
thinking about how both men and women are limited by gender stereotypes.

The HNS Conference Panel was an opportunity to
explore the question further. It was fascinating to learn about the origins of
the word “feisty”, which has roots in a Germanic word for a small dog and is also
related to an Old English word for breaking wind. I hadn’t realised it was so insulting.
I checked its meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary which gave: “Aggressive,
excitable, touchy”. Of the four examples of usage the OED listed, two referred
to male characters, one to a horse and one to a woman described as “feisty as a
terrier”.

As was pointed out during the panel debate,
descriptive words are gendered. We don’t call Alexander the Great a feisty
hero, for example. And we are all, I am sure, familiar with hearing women who
voice their opinions described as strident or shrill. The discussion also
touched on the performative aspects of gender – one thing that historical
fiction can do so well is show us how women performed differently at different
times as ideas of what constitute femininity and masculinity changed.

So why don’t I write about feisty heroines? After
all, I can enjoy a feisty heroine as much as the next woman – bring on Xena, Warrior
Princess I say! And strong, rebellious, passionate heroines can be inspirational
too.

But I’m not always sure that the feisty heroine does
women any favours. Their stories can seem so far-fetched and anachronistic they
actually tell us very little about the female condition. The feisty heroine is
the exception to the rule. She’s often in a privileged position because of
wealth, social status or beauty. And too often her strength is defined in
relation to masculine qualities: she may ride, shoot and dress like a man, run her
estates as well as any man, be as learned as a man...and all I can think is,
“Is this all?” Is this all that it means to be a strong woman? (It doesn’t help
that her reward is often a man!) There are other sorts of strength – as
panellist Kate Forsyth points out in her article Fie on the Feisty Heroine –
the strength to make something of your life despite the constraints.

Of course I want to write about interesting women. But
who says women have to be feisty to be interesting? The “dutiful wife”, the
woman who sits and sews, the woman who says yes with her lips but no with her
heart, has her story to tell. What wouldn’t you give to know what goes on
behind those calm eyes? It is just as likely to be a story as rich in passion,
peril and courage as any scrape of our feisty heroine’s.

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About Me

I live in Bristol and I write historical fiction and non-fiction. In 2006 I completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in eighteenth century literature.
My historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. To date they are: To The Fair Land (2012); and the Dan Foster Mystery Series comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The Fatal Coin (2017) and The Butcher’s Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Historical Fiction Award 2016.
The Bristol Suffragettes (non-fiction), a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the south west which includes a fold-out map and walk, was published in 2013.